Just in time for the holidays, the SimCity Societies team has released a new patch for the game. This second patch includes the new strategic modes SIMphoni reported on earlier this week, along with several other fixes.

A complete list of updates follows below the cut.

Strategic Mode Update Ready For Download

With today’s update, we are adding Strategic Mode, along with other additions, improvements and fixes.
Game Update #2 Notes
Strategic Mode
• Three Strategic Modes of play have been introduced, to complement the original three Creative Modes of play.
• Each of these Strategic Modes (Basic, Hardcore and Nightmare), is progressively more challenging than the preceding one, and all three introduce a variety of challenging push-backs not present in the Creative Modes of play:
o Buildings carry an ongoing maintenance cost. If maintenance requirements are not met, buildings have a chance of taking damage which will put them out of commission for several days or even result in destruction.
o Recycle gains are reduced, making shrewd planning critical
o Work and visit durations are long. As a result, Sims can go to fewer places in a single day.
o It’s more difficult to keep Sims happy
o Unhappy and Rogue Sims are more likely to act out, produce negative special Sims, or transform into negative special Sims
o Rogue Sims are much less placated by the act of shutting down a workplace, and will remain unhappy or even on the verge of becoming rogue again.
• Achievements and monuments must be earned separately for each of the modes of play
• Hardcore and Nightmare Modes must be unlocked by winning a trophy in the preceding Strategic Mode (success in Basic Strategic unlocks Hardcore; success in Hardcore unlocks Nightmare).

General Enhancements
• UI textures can now change with your society. Look for altered UI appearances in Capitalist, Cyberpunk, Industrial, and Orwellian cities. Modders can use this added functionality to make more radical changes.

Modding
• Several XMLs that weren’t additive now are. Particularly, custom textures don’t all have to live in the same file, so multiple mods with custom textures should play together more nicely
• All attributes of a building XML in the mod folder now take priority over the original, so mods can meddle with all aspects of existing buildings
• The camera settings XML has been moved into its own folder so that it can be modded
• New versions of packages with the same names as old packages now overwrite the old package when installed
• Building textures can be modified directly from the building xml, no more need to use the custom profile textures

General Fixes
• The intended a cap on the number of subways and bus stops in a city was not previously operating properly, and has been fixed. There can now be only 50 of each in a given city.
• New base models have been added to some buildings to address some cases where the terrain would appear over the base.
• Fix for Sims temporarily disappearing if they arrived for work early
• The error message you get when your graphics card or drivers don’t meet the minimum requirements is now more helpful

Stability and Performance
• Fix for a rare crash which could happen on removal of a cultural prop
• Streaming textures provide improved performance and lower memory use-age, particularly in large cities
• Many general improvements to Sim AI performance
• Fix for a lock-up (which could sometimes lead to a crash) involving pathfinding and public transit
• Fix for memory overwrites (which could sometimes lead to a crash) involving Sim and building selection, building scripts, and the lighting system
• Saving takes much less additional memory. This should solve the out-of-memory errors during autosaves that some users were experiencing
• Fix for a crash on exit